In many manufacturing and processing applications, products or objects of various kinds are moved between workstations or processing stations by, for example, conveyors. In many circumstances it is advantageous to track each product or object along its processing path as it is conveyed by conveyor(s). This is particularly true of processes where it is desirable to maintain information regarding products as to the source of each product and/or individual components of the product as well as various characteristics of the product that may be determined during processing. In particular, such tracking has become increasingly important in the meat processing industry. That is, it has become desirable to track meat products such as primals from the packaging of such primals back to a carcass from which each primal was obtained and even further, to the lot of animals from which the carcass was obtained so that, for instance, the animal growers may be identified.
Moreover, the cutting floor of a typical meat packaging facility produces meat products representing a value of several hundred million dollars each year. The value of the meat products that are produced is dependent on the way the animal carcasses are divided into primals and on the way the primals are trimmed of fat and skin. Cutting floor operations have typically been monitored on the basis of total daily production of various primals, if the cutting floor production has been monitored at all. One of the reasons for such coarse monitoring is the difficulty in tracking meat products through various cutting and trimming operations. In particular, it has been difficult to effectively track and gather appropriate data for relating trimmed primals all the way back to the original animal carcasses and producers from which they came. Further, due to this difficulty in tracking, there has been little motivation for retaining characteristics of various meat products. That is, any measurement of a meat product, such as fat to lean ratio, color, marbling, shape, abscess, texture, if measured at all, has by necessity been immediately used for evaluating the meat product. Accordingly, the steps of gathering data regarding a particular meat characteristic and the step of using this data have typically been applied in succession to the same meat product and then the data has been discarded or disassociated from the meat product due to difficulties in maintaining an association of the data with their primals. Thus, even if it were advantageous to perform a particular action, based on the value of a particular meat characteristic, at a later time or in combination with other characteristics, such processing has typically not been available to the meat packaging industry.
Due to such inadequacies in such tracking and associating of information with meat products, carcasses and primals have been largely measured in terms of aggregate statistics such as daily production instead of finer categories such as quantity of meat of a particular color, fat/lean ratio, etc.
For example, carcass evaluation has typically been performed on the killing floor with a grading device that calculates an expected total lean content of the expected primal yields based on measurements of fat and muscle depths. Both manually operated optical probes and ultrasonic scanners are used on the killing floor for this purpose. However, the estimated expected lean contents and yields are relatively inaccurate. In fact, the estimated expected yield can be off by as much as 40%. Thus, since animal growers are compensated according to these estimates on the killing floor, substantial inaccuracy can occur in compensating and rating animal growers since the actual yields from their animals remains unknown.